OT: Sci-Fi and Fantasy Thread - SPOILERS Part Three

[Surrounded By Ahos]

so i think i may have settled on my next series after i finish off the 12 Space Team books...is there an order to reading Discworld?

There are a few schools of thought on this. You can't go wrong with publication order, but other people recommend reading each 'series' in order, depending on what interests you the most.

I read through the first five books in order, then didn't touch it for a decade. I grabbed the first book in the Watch series, plowed through most of that, then read through the whole series over the next year or so.

Both ways have their merits, although I'd probably lean towards reading them in order (just keep in mind that the first few books are wildly different in tone from the rest of the series. It took Terry a little while to find his footing)

 

[ajgoal]

Discworld, not Ringworld. Makes waaay more sense now.

 

[Surrounded By Ahos]

I'm just over 1/3 into Titus Groan, the first of the Gormenghast books, and it's certainly unique. The prose is spectacular, and while nothing much has really happened yet (the only things I'd consider part of the plot are a baby being born, and a kitchen boy climbing around on the rooftops of a castle Dark Souls style) I'm totally enthralled. It's glacially slow. At one point the author spends several paragraphs describing the emotion a character feels in what could be quickly described as her happy place. All the characters seems to range on a scale from unstable to actually insane

Some books you can just blaze through quickly. Titus Groan isn't that. It really demands that you sit down and appreciate it slowly. It's weird, and I love it for that. I'm so glad I've been trying to branch out a bit from the typical fantasy fare.

 

[Surrounded By Ahos]

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present the First Annual(?) "SBA's Books I Read This Year" tier list:


S Tier: Books I would consider a foundational part of who I am and will recommend without hesitation:

A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, Tehanu, The Curse of Chalion, Something Wicked This Way Comes, Nation

A Tier: Books I loved:

Raising Steam, The Shepherd's Crown, Before They Are Hanged, Last Argument of Kings, Yumi and the Nightmare Painter, The Sunlit Man, Perdido Street Station, Consider Phlebas, Gideon the Ninth, The Spear Cuts Through Water, Harrow the Ninth, The Library at Mount Char, Nona the Ninth, Red Sister, Grey Sister, Holy Sister, The Scar, Redwall

B Tier: Books I enjoyed:

Tress of the Emerald Sea, The Traitor Baru Cormorant, This Is How You Lose the Time War, The Farthest Shore, The Carpet People, Shards of Earth, The Left Hand of Darkness, Black Company, Ancillary Justice

C Tier: Books I finished:

How High We Go in the Dark, The Shadow of What Was Lost, Wind and Truth (I wanted to like this a lot more than I did, I feel like there's a pretty decent 800 page book that got stuffed into 1300 pages)

D Tier: Books I don't think were worth finishing:


Pawn of Prophecy (I feel like I'm being a bit harsh here, but I was pretty ambivalent on this overall, and the reveal near the end that Barak raped his wife on their wedding night really put me off entirely)

 

[Lord Defect]

Edit the Malazan series to whichever number in the series Dust of Dreams happens to be.
Prairie fire and concrete jungle are more along the lines of the zombie survival guide but for inner city or rural “preppers”
Also add in Mongol Moon’s sequel and a spin off “holiday fever dream short story” from the same author, as well as a parody short story from a different “author”.

I enjoyed the Conan books but man it was also a slog to get through them. The compendium I have of them somehow included a few of the longer stories multiple times, spaced out far enough that it too a little too long to realize that I’ve read it already.

 

[trostol]

good to see MHI on there!!!!

 

[Surrounded By Ahos]

Wrath of the Wendigo is an elite title.

I'm considering starting Malazan soon. I'll hopefully be finished with Titus Groan in the next few days. I may do something lighter in between, though. Titus has been a LOT and from what I understand Malazan is a bit of a dense read as well.

 

[Lord Defect]

good to see MHI on there!!!!

Such a fun series.

Wrath of the Wendigo is an elite title.

I'm considering starting Malazan soon. I'll hopefully be finished with Titus Groan in the next few days. I may do something lighter in between, though. Titus has been a LOT and from what I understand Malazan is a bit of a dense read as well.

Dude has a habit of using $10 words whenever he can and falls into patterns of using a particular word as nauseam. I think the 2nd thru 5th books was “ochre”.
Great series so far.

 

[ajgoal]

Wind and Truth (I wanted to like this a lot more than I did, I feel like there's a pretty decent 800 page book that got stuffed into 1300 pages)

I feel that way about Stormlight in general. I have enjoyed all of the other Cosmere books much more.

 

[Surrounded By Ahos]

Dude has a habit of using $10 words whenever he can and falls into patterns of using a particular word as nauseam. I think the 2nd thru 5th books was “ochre”.

I do most of my reading on my kindle, and it's so nice being able to look up the definition of a word on the fly. As much as I loved reading Perdido Street Station and The Scar, a lot of the time it felt like Mieville was just flaunting his vocabulary.

I feel that way about Stormlight in general. I have enjoyed all of the other Cosmere books much more.

I feel like it's getting worse. Every book has gotten longer and longer. Way of Kings had 383,000 words. Wind and Truth had 491,000. They just feel so bloated at this point.

 

[Lord Defect]

I almost exclusively read on my phone thru the kindle app. The ability to look up definitions is clutch as hell, but I appreciate being able to start and stop a book at a moments notice without needing WiFi.
10 minutes waiting in an office, might as well read a bit.

 

[Surrounded By Ahos]

I finally got through Titus Groan yesterday. Man, that shit is DENSE. Mervyn Peake makes Tolkien seem brief. I think I mentioned that he spent several paragraphs explaining how one character felt while entering a certain room. The whole f***ing book is like that. Hell, this is the first paragraph:

“Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls. They sprawled over the sloping arch, each one half way over its neighbour until, held back by the castle ramparts, the innermost of these hovels laid hold on the great walls, clamping themselves thereto like limpets to a rock. These dwellings, by ancient law, were granted this chill intimacy with the stronghold that loomed above them. Over their irregular roofs would fall throughout the seasons, the shadows of time-eaten buttresses, of broken and lofty turrets, and, most enormous of all, the shadow of the Tower of Flints. This tower, patched unevenly with black ivy, arose like a mutilated finger from among the fists of knuckled masonry and pointed blasphemously at heaven. At night the owls made of it an echoing throat; by day it stood voiceless and cast its long shadow.

The whole book is like that. Like I said, not much really 'happens'. It's mostly full of descriptions of the castle (which has an extreme FromSoft vibe, if you're into that) and the day to day lives/rituals/goings on of the denizens of said castle, with a focus on a kitchen boy with a bit of a Machiavellian streak named Steerpike.

I can't recommend it highly enough, it's a triumph of the English language. Read this book or die a coward.

 

[Surrounded By Ahos]

I finished off the last Earthsea book, The Other Wind, just now. Fantastic series. Le Guin was a wonderful writer. Her ability to pack a lot of story into just a few words is unmatched. It was a nice refresher after Titus Groan, which was great, but exhausting.

 

[ajgoal]

So, the death of

Spoiler

Molli

might be the most heartbreaking thing of all of Sanderson's books so far for me.